Modern Analysis
Historians and Egyptologists such as Adolf Erman and Kurt Heinrich Sethe once thought the tales of Westcar Papyrus were mere folklore. Magical tricks that show animals being decapitated and their heads being replaced were performed as recently as a few decades ago, though today they are rarely shown because of aesthetical and ethical misgivings.
Modern Egyptologists like Verena Lepper and Miriam Lichtheim deny this view and they argue that Sethe and Erman may have just failed to see the profundity of such novels. They point to multiple similar but somewhat later ancient Egyptian writings in which magicians perform very similar magic tricks and make prophecies to a king. According to Lepper and Lichtheim, their stories are obviously inspired by the tale of Dedi. Descriptive examples are the papyri pAthen and The prophecy of Neferti. These novels show how popular the theme of prophesying already was during the Old Kingdom - just like in the story of the Westcar Papyrus. And they both talk about subalterns with magical powers similar to those of Dedi's. The Papyrus pBerlin 3023 contains the novel The Eloquent Peasant, in which the following phrase appears: “See, these are artists who create the existing anew, who even replace a severed head”, which can be interpreted as an allusion to the Westcar Papyrus. pBerlin 3023 contains another reference which strengthens the idea that many ancient Egyptian novels were influenced by Westcar Papyrus: column 232 contains the phrase sleeping until dawn, which appears nearly word-by-word in the Westcar Papyrus. Since pAthen, pBerlin 3023 and The prophecy of Neferti show the same manner of speaking and equal picking up quaint phrases, Lepper and Lichtheim hold that Dedi (and the other wise men from same papyrus) must have been known to Egyptian authors for a long time.
Read more about this topic: Djedi
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or analysis:
“O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its head o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife—”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)